Surgical procedures are often used to treat and cure a wide range of diseases, conditions, and injuries. Surgery often requires access to internal tissue through open surgical procedures or endoscopic surgical procedures. The term “endoscopic” refers to all types of minimally invasive surgical procedures including laparoscopic, arthroscopic, natural orifice intraluminal, and natural orifice transluminal procedures.
Endoscopic surgery has numerous advantages compared to traditional open surgical procedures, including reduced trauma, faster recovery, reduced risk of infection, and reduced scarring. Endoscopic surgery is often performed with an insufflatory fluid present within the body cavity, such as carbon dioxide or saline, to provide adequate space to perform the intended surgical procedures. The insufflated cavity is generally under pressure and is sometimes referred to as being in a state of pneumoperitoneum. Surgical access devices are often used to manipulate the patient's internal tissue while maintaining pneumoperitoneum. For example, trocars are often used to provide a port through which endoscopic surgical instruments are passed. Trocars generally have an instrument seal which prevents the insufflatory fluid from escaping while an instrument is positioned in the trocar.
Various surgical instruments can be configured to manipulate tissue during an endoscopic surgical procedure. Some surgical instruments can have a housing or handle portion, an elongate shaft, and an end effector that can be selectively coupled to the elongate shaft. In certain aspects, the end effector can be “modular,” i.e., selectively attached and detached from the shaft. While the modularity of the end effector can improve the device's versatility, it can be difficult to load an end effector onto a surgical device. In some instances, a loading device separate from the surgical instrument that operates the end effector is used to deliver end effectors to the surgical instrument. Certain loading devices are designed to have an articulating distal portion that holds the end effector in a fixed position during the loading process. However, the end effector and the distal portion of the loading device can undesirably move relative to the shaft of the surgical device onto which the end effector is loaded. Still further, during some surgical procedures it can be desirable to adjust an angle of the articulating distal portion of the loader relative to the loader's elongate shaft and/or the shaft of the instrument on which the end effector is being loading. Existing loading devices typically include cable or wire based articulation systems that tension the cable/wire to articulate the distal portion of the loader and these cable/wire based systems can cause undesirable relative motion between the end effector and the shaft of the surgical device on which the end effector is being loaded. This can make it difficult to attach the end effector onto the distal end of the surgical device and to withdraw the end effector from the loading device. In fact, in some instances, a user may think that the end effector was properly loaded, only to discover after the surgical device is moved away from the loader that the end effector and device were not properly aligned so the end effector was not properly secured to the device.
Accordingly, there is a need for articulating surgical devices and loaders having stabilizing features.